Editorial: Turning gaze to Red Sox with football in rear view

With three quarters of Super Bowl XLVI in the books, NBC color commentator Chris Collinsworth summed up the heart-in-the-throat feelings of many viewers, no matter their allegiances.

Collinsworth, himself a veteran of two super Bowls during his days as a receiver with the Cincinnati Bengals, asked simply: Can’t these two teams play all the time?

We understood his thinking, even as we knew that our poor hearts just couldn’t take it. Especially given the way these games keep turning out.

Fans of the New York Football Giants, as the team was once known, had their day again on Sunday. Just as in their last post-season meeting four years earlier, the favored New England Patriots were dispatched by the Giants. The Patriots and their fans have nothing to be ashamed of though.

They might well have won on Sunday, just as they could have easily have come out on top in Super Bowl XLII.

Here in Patriots country, where not a few Giants fans linger, we’ll pause to tip our hat to the Giants, to quarterback Eli Manning, and Coach Tom Coughlin. The Giants were left for dead by football cognoscenti on more than one occasion during the regular season, with Coughlin all but fired in the minds of the TV talkers, in sports pages, across the blogosphere. But they squeaked into the playoffs, with a mere nine wins (against 13 for the Patriots), and kept on winning when it mattered.

Manning, with twice as many Super Bowl wins as brother Peyton and the same number of MVP awards as Patriots QB Tom Brady, can put his feet up, gaze at his two Super Bowl rings, and luxuriate.

And fans across New England can turn their sights to the Red Sox. Baseball, thank goodness, begins to gear up soon after the NFL season concludes.